The earliest studies of Gordimer placed her within the liberal tradition of fiction, which had been regarded as the dominant tradition in White South African literature. Contemporary criticism regards that tradition now as obsolete and irrelevant.

Certainly liberalism as a political ideology has passed out of relevance for post-Sharpeville and Soweto South Africa. The aesthetics of liberalism were centred on the "individual"—a being possessed of certain freedoms and faculties, and liberal fiction concerned itself with "forms of interaction between people as interactions between individual persons." And so short stories within this tradition would focus on individuals within individual situations. Also inherent in this tradition was the belief in the potentiality of people to "correct themselves, to liberate themselves from the inhibiting and perverting effects of social laws, codes and habits." Individuals, then, could master reality (to effect this correction), and for this to be adequately...